24 November 2009

I don't own enough pun-filled tee-shirts.

So, I donated to NaNo today, but I didn't know that I would also get a discount to ThinkGeek on top of it! It's $5 off an order of $25 or more, $10 off an order of $40 or more. So, I could get two tee shirts and something else and still get $10 off! Whee!

The thing is, I don't know what I want yet. And they have too many black shirts. So, if anyone was looking for any more things to get me for Christmas, here's a little list.
Seriously, so many things I do not own but should.

---

So, I'm 20k into my second novel. Happy fun times. Also found time today to not only write more fanfiction but to also write a somewhat coherent essay. I'm so tired right now. I don't even think tired begins to describe it. Also, I miss everyone in the states. It's hard to be away during Thanksgiving time.

We had lunch with the Warden today, and though I think we were all expecting it to be very fancy, it was not. We went in regular clothes and just chatted with the Warden for a while about how awesome Oxford and New College are. And about the States. Our warden is from Missouri by way of Illinois, or something, but he's a full British citizen. Really awesome guy, really down to earth but still seems like he knows what he's doing. It was also nice to get together with the few other visiting students we have here and enjoy some new British food (today's item: Cumberland sauce).

Okay, so my eyes are drooping from tired and my fingers feel like they might fall off (they are burning, I cannot make this sensation up), so I think this needs to be the end of my typing today.

- Jen -

23 November 2009

This Beautiful Tuesday

[Cross-posted to Blogspot, Facebook, and LiveJournal.]

So, I have a request for all of the people that read this blog, and it comes from the bottom of my heart.

You know that thing I do every November where I basically ignore you for a month, talk and mumble to myself a whole lot, and never seem to be on time to anything? It's called National Novel Writing Month, and it's hosted through the lovely people at nanowrimo.org. The site was founded by Chris Baty back in 1999 in order to give those people who thought "one day, I'll write a novel" a chance to make it into a reality.

The site is free to use, the forums are loaded with information and yet still load really quickly (thanks to new cloud computing servers), and many many users (around 150,000 participants in total) have a place to come and hang out during November where they can get support in reaching a magnificent goal.

You guys have seen my success in the past three years with this. In 2007 I wrote a 61k novel, last year I wrote an 88k novel, and this year I've already completed a 113k novel, ten short stories, and working towards another completed 50k novel by the end of the month. The thing is, I would not have been able to do it had it not been for the amount of support I've had from other users on the forums. They also understand that it feels like the end of the world when your plot won't budge, and they also understand the joy of finally breaking through the writer's block and pulling out a piece of prose that might not even be so bad for a first draft.

The thing is, NaNoWriMo is built off of donations. These are donations from companies, from users, or from users that have been sponsored by their friends. Also, I believe a portion from the merchandising also goes towards fundraising. There's a problem with this: novelists aren't always able to give as much as they'd like. This year, NaNoWriMo has raised only 4.5% of their operating costs. This doesn't cover even just the NaNoWriMo side, let alone the Young Writer's Program, which helps kids in elementary and middle school to write, and Script Frenzy, which encourages participants to write a 100-page script during the month of... March? April? (Yeah, I don't do Screnzy, but it's important to mention it, since it's another invention of the Office of Letters and Light.)

So, in order to counter this, NaNoWriMo is having its largest fund drive ever this Tuesday. November 24, from 12:01 AM Pacific time to 11:59 PM Pacific time. (For you English types, that's 8:01 AM on November 24 to 7:59 AM on November 25; for you ND types, that's 3:01 AM on November 24 to 2:59 AM on November 25. Fun with time zones ahoy!) Their goal is to raise $100,000 in 24 hours. It's totally doable as long as people like me reach out to help. But to put this in perspective, the largest fundraising day NaNoWriMo has ever had landed in at $30,000.

So, I'm going to be doing my part. Since I've been using the forums for the past three years and $10 is the minimum donation that will get you a donor halo on your profile, I will be donating $30 to the cause. You can donate as much as you'd like, just please, please donate. I'm looking at you, you folks who forgot my birthday this year. You know what, I'd rather have a sizable donation going to NaNoWriMo this year from me anyways, since I'm doing my best ever and probably won't have the time to be this prolific ever again. So, whatever you'd normally spend on a friend's birthday ($20-$50, let's say), please, donate it to the site instead, it would mean much more to me.

Because the fact is, if we don't raise enough money... NaNoWriMo isn't coming back next year. There will be no forums for me to enjoy while I flesh out my novels, and without those forums I may not have the energy to do it alone. So, please. If you care about me, if you care about what I like, if you care that I've been pouring out my heart and soul this month into these novels of mine... please. Please donate. Or grab some merchandise from the store. (They have some pretty awesome posters, even for the non-novelists, and on my Blogspot blog I've even listed bits of merch I'd want for Christmas.)

There's an incentive for reaching the goal on Tuesday: Chris Baty, the founder of NaNoWriMo, has promised to pen a song entitled "This Beautiful Tuesday" and perform it on video (with his other volunteers doing interpretive dance alongside him). It's enough of a reward that I definitely want to see it. So please, everyone. (Notice how many times I've said 'please' in this post? I really mean it.) Please donate. Please help me keep alive one of the things that I feel makes me who I am.

- Jen -

22 November 2009

More adventures in muddy fields.

So, for the second weekend in a row, my weekend was mostly awesome. We're not going to talk about ND's loss yesterday in favor of OSU handing Michigan their own head on a platter.

On Friday night, I actually got a ticket into guest dinner! That was really nice, because all of the ND people ended up getting a ticket, and we were all able to talk together and everything. AJ brought a friend, Katie, from Wooster, and it was nice to talk with another humanities person for a while. The dinner itself was all right, too, but it probably wasn't as much fun sober as it would have been tipsy. I should have hung out in the bar with Katie and AJ, but I realized while they were getting their drinks that I needed to finish my novel.

So, I went back to write. I got to talk to Greg for a while, and I got to see some of the pictures he had taken for his project. And he ended up bribing me to finish my chapters with parts of his project, most specifically pictures of Rory. Oh, stupid sexy Rory. But I did eventually finish my novel (at four minutes to midnight!), and it clocks in at 113,359 words... but I forgot to write "THE END" on it, so I actually get two more words out of it. This is also using Word 2007's word counter, which apparently uses a different algorithm from the one on the NaNo site. I really hope I don't lose too many words to the NaNo one... in fact I hope I gain some. :3

Also, on Thursday I joined a fandom. Yes, I joined a fandom, for real and all. I figured if I was going to make a novel-length fanfiction about Freelancers, then people might as well read it and appreciate it. And if it's good enough, maybe I can get it published with the blessings of Rooster Teeth and Bungie. This is a bad thing; I still need many many words during November on top of other reading and essay writing.

Yes, you read that right. Even though I finished my first novel this month, I'm going for a second. I'm on track, actually; I only need 5k a day through the 30th to make this one hit 50k, which is NaNo's requirement for the length of a novel. So, yeah. By the end of the month I will be the proud owner of two novels. My problem right now is, the novel I just started writing is ridiculous. It's abusing way too many tropes. Way too many. Seriously, I added zombies and a random werecat into what was supposed to be a deconstruction of high fantasy MMORPGs. Oops... at least I'll be having fun.

So last night there was another write-in with the Failed Novelists, this one at Wolfson College (which, I may note, is VERY FAR AWAY from New College). It's an all-grad-student hall, and it's so new that it still smells like IKEA (if that gives you any idea of how modern it looks). We wrote in their very comfortable MCR room (Middle Common Room - like a common space for the graduate-level students to hang out) before dropping our stuff off in Selena's room and tramping through muddy paths next to strawberry fields and the river to make it to yet another far-off pub.

This one was called The Victoria Arms, and I had my first glass of mulled British cider there. Absolutely delicious. And for some reason, the conversation revolved around organs you can possibly live without, suicide snuff films, and the possibility that the soul continues on after death as the literal 'ghost in the machine' in a parallel series of tubes. (We are a strange group.)

It rained as we were walking back to Wolfson, and of course I was not only wearing my glasses but had left my umbrella. Didn't matter; was still fun getting soaked because heck, I'm in Middle Earth/Harry Potter land, and that's what you do, right? I've never been more thankful for a good pair of rain boots and a nice trenchcoat. Anyways, we made it back mostly intact and hung out in the kitchen near Jed's room for a while, enjoying white wine, coffee, and talk about Firefly and vegetables. Then we got to see some of Jed's paintings, and geez. Lots of thought in their composition, I really liked them.

Jed and Selena tried to persuade the other five of us (hold on, I totally remember names: Vicky, Alex, Tom, and Joe) to stay and chat in the Wolfson bar (which is open until 2:30, ridiculously late compared to other places), but it was half-twelve and I was so ready to go home. So that was the second day that I crawled into bed around 2 in the morning and still couldn't sleep because I was so excited.

Yeah, so I totally love it here, just in case you haven't been able to tell by my blog entries. Perhaps later I can blog about what we discussed at hall last night (which included something like athletes, scholarships, and the growing burden of debt on the middle class). In the meantime, though, I need to do a lot of reading for Ethics still, and I need to finish by dinner ish so that I'll still have time to write my 5k today!!! So busy, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

- Jen -

15 November 2009

Countryside adventures

Last night I had the opportunity to go to a write-in at an abandoned church in the English countryside, and... yeah, it was an adventure. It was a thirty-minute walk through a muddy cow field, and I was one of the few people to actually be wearing wellies (the British word for rain boots). Once we actually got to the church, Jed had brought candles, so we looked around, poked in all the nooks and crannies, recited some poetry, and finally noveled a little. I finished a chapter in the church in about 50 minutes, though my hands were freezing (I don't have my fingerless gloves here) and I could see my breath every time I breathed out. Really cool... wish I had been writing gothic fiction or fantasy, it would have made the atmosphere so much better.

So, after we all got a little writing done, we headed to the nearby pub, the Perch. It's so far away from town but I really recommend it. We went in the back entrance, which had a series of arches lit by Christmas lights, then went into a garden of gigantic weeping willow trees before we got to the pub itself. It was gorgeous; I thought I was on Middle-Earth or something. Inside the pub I got my first experience with mead, which is... honeyed wine, I think, I don't know really. But it was warm, and it was the perfect drink after spending so much time in the cold. Spent a lot of time talking about Men Who Stare At Goats, drowning babies and how babies cry in their native language, synaesthesia, and shooting guns. (It was a G36, by the way, check my blog entries from September.)

After some other excellent conversation we headed back to Jericho (the town next to Oxford), still chatting and looking at the stars (which surprisingly look the same as the US, but brighter since there was so little light pollution in that cow field). We were on the way back when we found a bar called Freud (I can't make this stuff up) and I ended up staying until 2 in the morning. Excellent rum in the rum and coke apparently. Ended up doing some dancing in the middle of the bar (try waltzing in rain boots, it's difficult, but I managed to do it), and got Tom to demonstrate the White Man Shuffle for the British people.

It's so much fun talking with Americans among British people. We'll start talking about things, then have to explain something like, why guns are so popular in the States. Apparently you're not allowed to own guns in Britain so gangsters own dogs and knives instead. What a strange concept for an American! I also got asked if I was engaged because of the promise ring Justin got me. Only one other American understood the phrase 'He went to Jared' but it came across. They were somewhat confused that a promise ring was different from an engagement ring; I explained that for us, engagement means he actually asked me to marry him and we've set a date and all that, but promised means that someday he will ask me to marry him and I'm very definitively taken. They all thought my ring was pretty, too, which was a huge ego boost for me because I love it and wear it every day. I'm so glad other people notice these things!

More later if I can remember. I have to do work but I keep getting distracted by RiffTrax...

- Jen -

14 November 2009

Personal accomplishments.

Yesterday I wrote the most I have ever written in one 24-hour period. I wrote 12,378 words that took probably 5 hours to write, not counting times that I went to dinner and took breaks to stretch my hands. And I don't think that means a lot to anyone, but think of this: It was six chapters. Six chapters! Six really fun chapters, where things actually began happening. And I passed 4 days' worth of my daily goal this year in one day. Not even one day, because I didn't devote my whole day to it, just from 4 PM-11PM. Disregarding the hour I spent at dinner, five out of those six hours were spent frantically typing.

My hands are sore, and my head hurt so badly that I slept two extra hours today, but it was so, so worth it. The sad part is, to me, that no one will really understand how much of an accomplishment it really is. This isn't quite the longest work of fiction I've ever written (last year's novel at 88.5k takes the prize for now), but it will be by the time I'm done; rough estimates at this point put it at 110k at least. And with the pace I'm moving at, I will probably finish sometime during the early 20s, so maybe in as early as ten days. After the novel is done, I have another novel without an outline and I really want to see what I can do with it - usually, no plotting means that I get completely lost, but this idea might hold up on its own. I'd like to squeeze another 50k out of it just so I can say that I wrote two novels in a month, but then again, there's a delicious Firefly fanfic that I want to write by the end of the month. Probably won't clock in at more than 7k, but still, that would take most of a day to do.

Long story short, I've pretty much amended my goal for this month from 100k to... let's say, 115k for the first novel, 50k for the second, 7k for the Firefly fanfic... yeah. Somewhere around 175k. I want to point out at this point that my entire goal for last year's NaNo was 75k. Then again, I drastically overshoot everything I do by a large margin, so this doesn't exactly surprise me.

I'm excited because the Failed Novelists (the writing club I've started attending here) are having a NaNo write-in tonight at an abandoned church. Hopefully my laptop can stand up to not being plugged in, because I'd like to write on it for at least a few hours. I type so much faster than I handwrite, and it's so helpful with fiction because I see what I'm writing like a movie (when I do point of view, I think of it as cameras behind that character's head, if that gives you any indication). When things are going so fast visually, my hands need to be able to keep up. Thus why they hurt so badly today - I think I was going so fast yesterday that I set my fingers on fire!

---

I'm kind of offended right now because one of my friends decided to call me 'unwilling to go for glory' in his blag. Normally this wouldn't be a big deal, but as you see by the above, it's totally not true. I don't know of anyone else here who is trying to write so much in so little time with so much else on her plate. To write that I'm not gutsy and won't go for anything is just libel, and I won't stand for it.

The comment was given in the context of not being in the 'backroom,' being the grunt or mook who just sits there and gets all the work done without getting any of the praise. My friend has decided (and good for him, if he can live with the implications) that he will be the one to lead such grunts and take the 'glory' for their accomplishments. Now, it's true that people who go into 'grunt' fields or do 'grunt' work usually don't get any acknowledgement, but they're usually content with that or they wouldn't have chosen that job in the first place.

What the argument assumes is that there are leader jobs and there are follower jobs. Perhaps this works in a large corporate environment, where there is a definitive tier structure. However, it disregards the fact that there are opportunities to move upwards, and my friend's argument assumes that there is not. For example, one of the fields I researched going into while I was a freshman was the field of book publishing. It's a rather thankless job for the first five to ten years that someone enters the field. It starts out with a series of coffee internships (you know, the internships that don't really mean anything, but have you job shadowing while you make the coffee for your boss) in, preferably, the summer after your sophomore year, then another internship summer after your junior year. By the time you graduate, you've accumulated enough respect at your internship company that they hire you... as the lowest-level grunt. There's really no opportunity to move upward until you put in your time, and meanwhile, the books you're publishing become more famous for their authors. But when you get to the top, you suddenly find yourself in a leadership position. It may take years and years of unacknowledged hard work, but suddenly you're top dog taking credit for what everyone else is doing.

So, not even all tier companies work the way my friend suggests in his argument. In fact, I think it's plausible to argue that most companies intend for younger employees to 'pay their dues' before they have the opportunity to go into leadership; personally, I think it's the best way for companies to divine who really belongs where. But let's introduce a new element: freelancers. I'm talking about people in the field I want to go into at this point, property law and corporate law. These people are usually consultants, on the periphery of any type of tier structure. They interact with the top dogs but do all of their own work. Instead of a tier, they're more self-sufficient, not only doing the work that deserves the praise but getting acknowledged for it.

So, to say that I'm unwilling to 'go for glory,' instead preferring to work in the 'backroom,' is a completely faulty assumption and I won't stand for such slander against my personal character. In corporate law, there is no backroom, and there is no public recognition of one's work (unless you're the representative of some hugely famous name... I remember reading an article in the WSJ at one point about the lawyers of Mac and Windows trying to reach settlements, and their names were mentioned in the article proper). There's just work. A lot of post-graduate education, then a lot of work.

---

Also, at this point I feel like I need to go into a defense of why it's not necessarily such a bad thing to be an introvert after all.

I think being an introvert might be necessary to being a writer. With only the plots and characters from my own head, I'm able to create fantasy worlds that I can dwell in for hours. Now tell me that doesn't sound like the stereotypical qualities of an antisocial young child. I'm self-satisfied by my work; I don't need anyone's approval for it to please me. It's nice when people do read it, but that's not necessary for the creative process.

I'm just fine being an introvert. I can deal with having relatively few people in my life that I know very well, I can deal with not being as social as other extroverts might want me to be. I've just never been the type of person to want superficial friendships or to attempt to be friendly with someone I genuinely can't stand or don't want to be closer to. It's just a difference in perspective, really, and I'm slightly tired of being perceived as being a bad person when my priorities are just different. I enjoy keeping my sense of shame, thank you very much, and I don't think anything's likely to change my mind any time soon.

---

As some final and mostly unrelated notes, toasters and I really don't get along - I burnt my lunch bagel for the second time today. Kind of depressing, because they were delicious :(

There are so many things here that British people take for granted. One of them is really low tuition fees. I got to watch the shock on my tutorial partner's face when I explained to him that I pay $65,000 a year to go to a university that is only barely in the top 25 in the country. Apparently, when he studied in Germany, he paid a 300-euro fee per term and that was it. People here are lobbying for change when they have to pay more than 7000 pounds a year for university. When I told him that I pay about $300 every semester just for books, I swore his jaw dropped off. Being here really puts some things into perspective... like how awesome libraries are, and how much I'm really overpaying to be here for just a year. Because on top of normal ND tuition, I now have to pay airfare to and from, I had to buy several things to make my life easier over here (like luggage and voltage converters), and I only get one meal a day.

Also, British people take good weather for granted. While I've been here, it's been nice enough that I can usually get away with wearing just two layers outside when it's sunny. When it's rainy, I just pull on my trenchcoat. People were complaining yesterday about rain, and I just wanted to laugh. Rain? Sheesh, you should see three feet of snow. Apparently, when there's so much as a half-inch here, people just don't know what to do. I'd hate to see it if they had an ice storm here; everyone would probably lose their heads. And explaining to them that we once had a day so cold on campus that it was down to -40 degrees (convergence in both Celsius and Fahrenheit!) was loads of fun too.

Also also, British girls my age don't seem to believe in pants. They quite often wear tunics and leggings (or just tunics and tights!) outside. No pants. I feel so American walking around in my trousers sometimes. It doesn't help that I'm definitely not of the build to pull off any of those fashions, so it just makes me feel kind of ridiculous when I walk down the street here.

I'm going to stop here, but I just want to point out that this blog entry is about 1850 words long (so says Microsoft Word), if that gives you any indication of how much I've been writing this month. So, cheers, everyone.

- Jen -

10 November 2009

Wait, why are there double digits?

I forgot how fast November can go by sometimes. I swear, yesterday was Tuesday too.

I had so many edits in my last post, but I suppose it doesn't matter. To quote my FMC (female main character, for those who don't speak in NaNo acronyms), "please, I'm just so tired..." I'm mentally exhausted. I can't read an ethics essay without wanting to sleep, every consecutive chapter is taking longer and longer to write, and it always rains on Tuesdays... conveniently the day of the week I always choose to run to the grocery. And I haven't heard from my family in over a week. I really hope everything is okay.

Just a half-hour ago, I realized what the loneliest place in the world is: it's right in front of your monitor, with only four words of a title on a Word document which you have to turn into a 2500-word essay by midnight or else YOU turn into a pumpkin. Or something like that. As you, the reader, can probably tell, the ease of metaphors has gone right out the window. But yeah, I have an essay due at midnight over a topic I don't really understand, but I have to get into the details anyways.

I'm just... tired. I'm so tired. November is my least favorite. There are so many things I want, I don't have the money or the inclination to buy them right now, and the one place I want to be is the place I can't go for another month.

Hopefully tonight I will at least book my hostel for my week in London for the week before I go home. I'm at least a little excited about it; I plan on doing a lot of shopping and museum hopping, picture taking and people visiting. I'm going to get marvelously lost and not worry about finding my way home just yet. I'm just worried about logistics... like which bus to take to London, which bus to take in London to get to the airport... blah.

I will worry later. Now is for work.

- Jen -

09 November 2009

November sucks.

It's been a rough month for me so far, but I'm making it. Don't know how, but I'm making it.

More things I've realized I want for myself, but don't have the money to get right now:
- LoZ: Twilight Princess soundtrack. Oh, it is so good. I have the others from the N64 generation of games, but they're just not as rich, though the themes themselves are good. ETA: Possibly Wind Waker as well. I am such a sucker for good video game soundtracks.
- FFVII. Which would also mean that I would need a PS2 to play it on. Seriously, I keep hearing so many good things about the storyline, the characters... I need to experience it for myself. And no, I've never played any Final Fantasy games before.
- This pendant. I realize it's incredibly pretentious to want jewelry from Tiffany's, but if anyone can find a knockoff that looks similar I'd be glad to see it.
- ETA: Holy crap I did not realize a new Legend of Zelda DS game was coming out in December. New number one item on the List Of Things I Want.

The novel is coming along well. Since I took a time-out this morning from everything to do my laundry and get stuck on TVTropes.org, I might take the day off from writing and instead focus more on my essay due Wednesday. Yes, focusing on schoolwork.

Otherwise, life is pretty boring. Remember to check out my Shutterfly site for pictures of my adventures. ETA: link is on the right side of the blag.

- Jen -

05 November 2009

Guy Fawkes Day

I just want to point something out to my American friends.

No one in Britain is running around today in Guy Fawkes masks and quoting lines from V for Vendetta (either the graphic novel or the film adaptation). Halloween was over the weekend; today is Guy Fawkes' Day. I don't know if you realize this, but British people treat it as somewhat of a big deal.

Guy Fawkes legitimately attempted to blow up Parliament. I don't know if you people think that's funny or not, but I think the British people consider it to be a terrorist action and consider it to be a good thing that Guy Fawkes was caught and executed for his crime. These people don't go around triumphantly extolling the virtues of Guy Fawkes; they burn his effigy instead.

I also don't think you people realize that V for Vendetta is a fictional story. The only relation that it has to the Guy Fawkes story is the masks that everyone uses and the quotation/three minute scene at the beginning of the movie. The entire thing is composed of a totalitarian government, which Britain currently does not have, and a terrorist cell attempting to take it down, something that we consider to be evil when a Middle Eastern group does it to their own government but something we appear to approve of in Western culture. It's a political fable, in short, it is FICTIONAL. V never existed. Acting as if he did, and as if V is all this holiday is about, is sadly misguided.

So for all of my friends who posted Facebook statuses quoting V, I'm ashamed of you. You're making a mockery of the British 4th of July. It's as if Britain were to announce that they still ruled over us while we were celebrating our independence. It's rude, it's ill-founded, and it distorts the sense of the holiday.

In conclusion, you just keep being 'funny.' I don't think the British populace is amused.

- Jen -

04 November 2009

November has been a rollercoaster.

Two nosebleeds in the past two days? No thank you.

More things I want for Christmas:
-Halo ODST soundtrack (what? it sounds pretty)
-latest Guitar Hero game for DS
-possibly some of the later series of Red vs. Blue on DVD? maybe?
-that being said, Dr. Horrible on DVD?

I've also decided that as soon as possible, I need to start watching Buffy. I kind of missed out on the whole phenomenon and that might need to be rectified.

Also, in the interest of things everyone already knows, TVTropes is a huge timesink.

I'm doing well on my novel. My characters are behaving well and I even laughed in a good way at something I'd written. I'm also doing well with the balance between wordcount goal and chapter goal.

I have a tutorial to be at in a half-hour, so I'm going to finish my tea and print my paper. Ciao, everybody.

- Jen -